A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives

Increasingly I think it makes sense to distinguish between different accelerationist positions. I rarely use the term to describe my own politics any more, both because I don’t want to risk association with far-right positions and because the potential vehicle for a left-accelerationist politics has been smashed into pieces. But my instincts remain left-accelerationist, in the sense of being inclined to ask how emerging technologies could be steered towards solidaristic and socially beneficial goals rather than being driven by the market. It means insisting we consider the technology analytically in ways which distinguish between emergent capacities and how those capacities are being organised at present by commercial imperatives. It means insisting we dive into the problems created by emerging technologies, going through them rather than seeking to go around them, rather than imagining we could hold them back by force of our critique.

In the mid 2010s this felt like quite an optimistic way to see the world but now it feels like a weirdly gloomy way to see the world, because the sense of collective agency underwriting such a future-orientation now seems largely, if not entirely, absent. It’s interesting therefore to see someone like Reid Hoffman, rare liberal member of the billionaire paypal mafia, offer a perspective which has some commonalities with this but could rather be described as a liberal humanist accelerationism. From pg 1-3 of the book Superagency, he’s written with Greg Beato:

We form groups of all kinds, at all levels, to amplify our efforts, often deploying our collective power against other teams, other companies, other countries. Even within our own groups of like-minded allies, competition emerges, because of variations in values and goals. And each group and subgroup is generally adept at rationalizing self-interest in the name of the greater good. Coordinating at a group level to ban, constrain, or even just contain a new technology is hard. Doing so at a state or national level is even harder. Coordinating globally is like herding cats—if cats were armed, tribal, and had different languages, different gods, and dreams for the future that went beyond their next meal. Meanwhile, the more powerful the technology, the harder the coordination problem, and that means you’ll never get the future you want simply by prohibiting the future you don’t want. Refusing to actively shape the future never works, and that’s especially true now that the other side of the world is only just a few clicks away. Other actors have other futures in mind. What should we do? Fundamentally, the surest way to prevent a bad future is to steer toward a better one that, by its existence, makes significantly worse outcomes harder to achieve.

The difference here is that he’s envisioning society as made up with more or less self-realised individuals, in a world in which power and vested interests is (primarily, at least) a matter of how those individuals interact rather than an enduring structural context to their interaction. But with this huge caveat, a lot of the assumptions and instincts here are similar to my own. This could in turn be contrasted to Tony Blair’s post-liberal accelerationism concerned with the role of the state under these conditions:

There’s a similar line of thought in this review by Nathan Pinkoski of Blair’s book on leadership. He describes Blair’s program as a “kind of post-liberal progressive rightism that promises to co-opt the progressive left while crushing the populist right”. Underlying this project is “a commitment to unlimited, unrestrained technological progress, and a belief that this will bring about a better world”.

And we might in turn distinguish this from the libertarian accelerationism of Marc Andreessen who seems to see little to no legitimate role ofr the state.

There’s a risk in distinguishing between these positions that we take them as doctrines, whereas I think they can better be understand as articulations of underlying instincts and orientations. How technology feels to people and how they feel about technology. Their inclination when presented with sociotechnical change etc.

The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:

trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.

What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?

They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.

What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.

As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:

There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.

And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:

With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.

Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.